I’ve recently become aware of a case where a final investigation and report conducted by Children’s Services to reinstate a father’s contact seems to have gone nuts! SS suspended contact following the father’s rampage of recording the child and self-reporting to them and police. The mother knew nothing until they knocked on her door!
The report recommends that during school holidays the mother take the child 56 miles away to a handover point at 12pm on a weekday every school holiday. This I presume is to placate a father demanding ‘shared’ contact – holidays only as the child resides with the mother.
The family court judge (female) appears to have followed all recommendations in the report ignoring the grubby background of the case (physical abuse, financial abuse and coercive control) and in particular, the needs and lifestyle of the mother who works full time. They’ve also ignored the needs of the daughter but that’s a different topic for another time!
We all know that working single parents spend some of their annual leave taking children to GP/Dental appointments, days off when the child is sick etc. To force them to take additional A/L to conduct hand overs in the middle of a work day every school holiday is surely a misplaced attempt at kindness to pacify a father’s (in this case) need for absolutism of ‘shared holiday contact’?
Am I being cynical in thinking that this would not have happened if the resident parent were a father working full time? Wouldn’t they all have presumed that dad works full time and realised the impracticality of his conducting handover in the middle of a work day!